1. Field
Example embodiments relate to a display apparatus, and more particularly, to a transflective display apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mobile devices, for example, mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), portable multimedia players (PMPs), and digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) devices have become widely used. These mobile devices have caused changes in lifestyles in view of their amount of use, application fields, and diverse contents. Mobile device displays have expanded to allow the display of web documents and video from a relatively simple information type display, for example, the display of sound and text.
In addition to displays of mobile devices, public information displays (PIDs) are leading a main outdoor billboard market owing to an emerging tendency toward video outdoor billboards instead of text based outdoor billboards. Outdoor visibility is a performance index for PIDs.
Transmittive display apparatuses or self-emission type display apparatuses with illumination of high luminance may be used to display a clear image in the bright outdoors. However, these display type apparatuses consume a relatively large amount of energy. Research into reflective type display apparatuses for displaying an image by using a peripheral light without additional energy consumption has been conducted, but the reflective type display apparatuses are inferior to the transmittive display apparatuses or self-emission type display apparatuses in terms of brightness and/or image quality.
Research into a transflective liquid crystal display (LCD) which is a combination of a reflective display device and a transmittive display device, has been actively conducted. In the transflective LCD, an image is formed using light from a backlight unit and/or an external light. Thus, when the transflective LCD is used in a bright environment with solar light, display visibility may be secured and power consumption may be easily reduced. However, in this case, liquid crystal cells are divided into two regions, for example, a reflective region and a transmittive region, so that a manufacturing process of the transflective LCD is complex and incident light is divided, thereby causing a decline in luminance.